I remembered what Thoreau had written in his journal about thinking nothing of walking eight miles to greet a tree.

Knowing another is endless,' Shepherd had written; 'The thing to be known grows with the knowing.

Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss.... We easily forget that we are track-markers, through, because most of our journeys now occur on asphalt and concrete--and these are substances not easily impressed.

I remembered what Thoreau had written in his journal about thinking nothing of walking eight miles to greet a tree.

The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.

All travelers to wild places will have felt some version of this, a brief blazing perception of the world's disinterest. In small measures it exhilarates. But in full form it annihilates.

We are fallen mostly into pieces but the wild returns us to ourselves